Baseball History, Commentary and Analysis

2012 Baseball Hall of Fame Vote Analysis

Let’s try to sift through the wreckage of the 2012 BBWAA Hall of Fame vote, and

attempt to reconstruct the debacle. Maybe we’ll find a black box or something.

1) Reds shortstop Barry Larkin received 86.4% of the vote, easily exceeding the 75% he needed for induction into the Hall of Fame. One of the top ten shortstops of all time, he is a worthy addition to the Hall of Fame.

2) Jack Morris received 66.7% of the vote. He has a couple of years left on the ballot, and stands a good shot at getting elected before his time is up. His career WAR was 39.3, the second lowest among the 14 players on the ballot who survived the cut. Morris received 382 votes. Brad Radke, career WAR 40.9, received just two votes and fell off the ballot. Morris had a mustache. Radke didn’t. BBWAA voters like men with mustaches. They think it makes them look tough, you know, like a Hall of Famer should.

3) Forty-four percent of the American public believes that the world is less than 10,000 years old. This is the same percentage as BBWAA voters who left Jeff Bagwell’s name off of their HOF ballots. One has to wonder if they are, in fact, the same people.

4) Lee Smith, a relief pitcher who specialized in taking naps before his 9th inning cameos, received 50.6% of the vote. Apparently, this means that about half of the voters believe the save is a crap statistic, and they are correct.

5) Tim Raines got 48.7% of the vote. What’s interesting here is that no one mentions anymore that Raines was part of a cocaine scandal that rocked baseball back in the 1980’s. It was a very big deal at the time. Yet Raines now has a real chance of someday getting into the HOF. What are we to make, then, of all the hullabaloo surrounding the PED scandal of recent times? My guess is that it’ll ultimately go the way of all American scandals, including Watergate, the Iran-Contra affair, etc. The public doesn’t so much forgive. It simply forgets.

6) Alan Trammell: Sometimes I think HOF voters are just kind of lazy. Why bother taking a look at a guy like Trammell’s numbers year after year? He just didn’t, you know, feel like a Hall of Famer when he was playing. Yet his career WAR (66.9) is better than Ozzie Smith, PeeWee Reese, Luis Aparicio, and Ernie Banks, not to mention Phil Rizzuto and Rabbit Maranville. In fact, Trammell’s career WAR is only slightly below Barry Larkin’s 68.9. I’m not saying that Trammell was as good as Larkin, but he is clearly legit Hall material. So why did he receive just 36.8% of the vote? Ask the voters.

7) The Designated Hitter rule came into being in the American League in 1973, the same year that Tony Orlando and Dawn dominated the singles charts with “Tie a Yellow Ribbon ‘Round the Old Oak Tree.” While Tony Orlando and Dawn are long since gone, the D.H. remains, a relic of the age of Nixon. The bastard child of Commissioner Bowie Kuhn and A.L. President Joe Cronin, it remains with us today, an oddity largely rejected by the BBWAA, who gave Edgar Martinez, the greatest D.H. ever, just 36.5% of the vote.

8) Fred “Crime Dog” McGriff received just 23.9% of the vote. If he’d hit just seven more career home runs, he would probably have doubled that vote total. Writers look at their hands a lot, and the BBWAA writers noticed that they have ten fingers, so they can only think in terms of numbers divisible by ten. 493 (home runs) is not divisible by ten. 500 home runs would be. Thus the low vote totals for Crime Dog.

9) Larry Walker (22.9%) played during an era where we were all buried in an avalanche of three-run home runs and 14-10 ball games. For a while, he called Coors Field home. Coors Field was to the baseball fan what the Best Little Whorehouse in Texas would be to a group of college under-grads, the ultimate venue to enjoy a bacchanal of pure lust and carnal pleasure. Larry Walker is being penalized for having been in the wrong place at the wrong time, and nothing’s going to change that.

10) Mark McGwire (19.5%) – The ultimate example of how our culture is like a pair of tectonic plates crashing into each other, causing massive earthquakes and unending destruction. We wanted massive biceps, towering home runs, Ruthian records, immortal legends. We got all of that. We also wanted Scouts Honor, drug-tested teachers, lock ’em up law and order, and family values. We got some of that, too. But the natural tension between the two caused a fissure to develop into which McGwire’s reputation dropped, wordlessly and without a murmur from a society that demanded his creation, and his demise.

Four other players, Don Mattingly, Dale Murphy, Rafael Palmiero, and Bernie Williams all received enough votes to remain on the ballot to fight another day. Thirteen other players dropped off the ballot. One of those players, Bill Mueller, actually received four votes for the Hall of Fame. Every society has a subculture, and every subculture has a lunatic fringe. Baseball is our little subculture, and, apparently, Bill Mueller voters are our lunatic fringe.

That’s as far as I care to go with this. Let me know your thoughts about today’s voting results.

A post about the HOF voting that includes Watergate, cocaine and Tony Orlando and Dawn. I think you covered it all Bill.
I totally agree with your take on Jack Morris and Lee Smith…I don’t understand their HOF appeal.
Kevin

Kevin, Good to hear from you, man. Yeah, when I went back to have a look at ’73, Tony Orlando was the first name that popped up. I had no choice but to go from there.
As for Morris and Smith, there seems to be a lowering of standards regarding pitchers these days for The Hall, and an increasingly high (and nearly impossible to meet) standard for hitters. So we will end up with more mediocre pitchers in The Hall, and plenty of excellent position players left out.
Thanks for reading, Bill

I believe there is a difference between PEDs and any other kind of substance abuse. Cocaine does not make you a better player, or rather it didn’t add strength. If anything , cocaine and alcohol detracts from one’s ability making Raines’, and especially Ruth’s achievements that much more impressive.

Hi Keith, I don’t disagree with you on that point. I don’t think I would vote for the PED’s boys, either. I just think it’s interesting that twenty years ago, if you asked someone if they thought Raines would ever have a chance to make it into The Hall (in light of the cocaine scandal) they would have said no way. It would tarnish the image of The Hall. Now, no one seems to care about that particular issue. It wouldn’t surprise me if the next generation of baseball fans (and writers) has a similar attitude about PED’s. There are already several writers out there, including Bill James and Jayson Stark, who believe we just have to accept what happened as part of the game at that time, and move on.